through examining the case of Doris Lessing’s
varying accounts of her mother, I discuss here the fundamental
fact/value entanglement involved in describing people, human
situations, and human relations. A serious consideration of the
ethical and epistemic challenges involved in biographical narration
will provide strong reasons for jettisoning the fact/value
dichotomy when thinking about human life. Yet, I do not propose
such considerations as providing an overall model for rejecting the
fact/value dichotomy, but rather suggest that there may be no
formal unity to the various considerations that speak against
upholding a fact/value dichotomy in different philosophical
discussions. Furthermore, seeking such unity, a “master theory” to
refute the fact/value dichotomy, may work against a sensitive grasp
of the various ways in which “fact” and “value” are entangled in
human understanding.

Doris Lessing, like many novelists prior to the autofictional
turn, is adamant about the distinction between biography and
fiction, and marvels in her autobiography over the inability of
some of her readers to accept that her literary characters are not
copies of real people she has known: “How often have I not seen a
face fall into disappointment when I say no, such and such a
character was imagined, or composed from half a dozen of similar
people, or transposed from another setting into this one. What we
are seeing is a reluctance of the imagination. What is wanted is
the real, the actual, what ‘really’ happened” (Lessing,
Walking in the Shade 336).

I begin by emphasizing my deep sympathy with this caution,
because in what follows, I use Lessing’s authorship in a manner
that may seem to break against this distinction, conflating
literature and life, discussing the figure of Lessing’s mother as
she comes through both in Lessing’s autobiographically based novels
and in her autobiographical writings. I am asking readers’
permission to break against the distinction in a specific case
where it seems (1) prompted by Lessing’s authorship, and (2) called
for to illuminate an insight that has gained increasing attention
in postcolonial studies and feminism, but is difficult to justify
in contemporary academic moral philosophy: the intertwinement of
knowledge and evaluation in our understanding of human affairs.

In Walking in the Shade, cited above, which is the
second part of her autobiography, Lessing notes that she has
probably been unfair to her mother in the partly autobiographical
Children of Violence series of novels (published between 1952 and
1969). I investigate the sense of this unfairness, and what might
be called the ethical memory work involved in recreating the image
of her mother, in the light of later life experience. Lessing’s
case provides rich material for reflections on the ethics and
epistemology of biography and autobiography, but I connect it here
to Iris Murdoch’s famous example of M, the mother-in-law, who over
time comes to see D, her daughter-in-law, in a more generous light
(Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics). The
case of Doris Lessing’s mother may help develop our understanding
of Murdoch’s example, bringing forth both the intuitive appeal of
Murdoch’s perspective on the intertwinement of knowledge and
evaluation, and the real-life difficulties (not well preserved in
Murdoch’s example) of achieving a truthful remembrance of another
person. I further discuss how attention to both Lessing and Murdoch
adds to and deepens insights concerning such intertwinement
discussed by Bernard Williams and Hilary Putnam. I suggest that the
strength of Lessing’s sprouting case is precisely in its real-life
resonance: the way in which any reflection upon it immerses us in
the fact/value entanglement, rather than presenting a generalizable
model of such entanglement.

1. Doris Lessing and the Mother

Consider Lessing’s descriptions of “the mother” first in her
autobiographical Children of Violence series, later in the second
part of her autobiography Walking in the Shade, and
finally in the late half-fictional and half-autobiographical book
Alfred and Emily. There is a striking resemblance
between the fictive mother of Martha Quest in the early novels of
the “Children of Violence” series, and the “real-life” mother of
Lessing as presented in her late biographical works. Both women
exhibit a...

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